“Stay down, Len! Keep the right shoulder flat against the stone!”
Ivara Quill didn’t waste time looking at his eyes. In a heavy-duty triage emergency, looking at a patient’s face was an emotional indulgence that cost minutes and lives. You looked at the source of the heavy bleeding, you calculated the rate of flow against the leftover blood volume, and you closed the channel before the systemic pressure head collapsed entirely. Her training as a chief land-mapper on the deep railway cuts had included thirty hours of field trauma order under country surgeons who dealt only with crushed limbs and boiler explosions. She knew the exact weight of a man’s life measured in fluid ounces.
The dark blood pooling beneath Len Vey’s left elbow was spreading across the granite flat stone slabs at three ounces a second. The welling had begun to slow, not. That was because the cut inner-bone vessels were clotting, but because his systemic blood pressure was plummeting as neurogenic shock dilated his outer blood-vessel beds. His fingernails were turning a semi-clear, waxy violet, his earlobes were white as lard. The skin across his forehead had grown cold and slick with the clammy sweat of acute blood-flow collapse. The shivering reflex had stalled. His core muscles lacked the stored energy to generate heat.
